The need to replace tissue lost to disease or injury or as a result of surgical intervention has been a long standing one. Although wound repair can occur in the absence of tissue replacement, such wound repair is often accompanied by severe scarring and loss of function. In those cases in which a patient suffers from a circulatory disorder or from diabetes, a dermal wound may fail to heal for months or years. This extended failure of wound healing often leads to infection and chronic discomfort. More seriously, under many circumstances severe tissue loss can be life threatening and replacement or surgical restoration becomes an absolute necessity.
One approach to accelerating the body's self-healing process is to provide a scaffolding made of a biocompatible material populated with appropriate cells. A highly desirable type of scaffolding can be fabricated from a naturally occurring biopolymer fiber such as collagen fiber.
It has been traditionally difficult to spin collagen fibers which have dimensional and strength properties like those which occur in organisms in vivo. Fibers produced by methods which preserve the inherent biological information break easily when subjected to even small mechanical stress. It is therefore desirable in the art to provide a method and apparatus for manufacturing collagen fiber of multiple deniers under conditions which minimize stress on the fiber.
Because the collagen fiber is ultimately destined for implantation in a human body, it is desirable that it be free of contamination by extraneous matter and micro-organisms. Consequently, it is desirable in the art to provide a method and apparatus for manufacturing collagen fiber in which the resultant fiber is reasonably free of such contaminants.